Ebooks are the fastest growing sector of the book business, by a long-shot, and there's this lingering question out there:
What is a book?
Text on pages, between covers, okay; and I think we can all agree that the electronic version of that thing is a book too, as long as it's the same text. Maybe some disagree with that last part, but one thing is certain: for all the great wonderfulness of a good old-fashioned print-and-page book, clearly in the digital age, we have a whole range of things we can add to a "book" to make it more than just the text.
Apt Studio recently released their iPhone app/ebook version of Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro. They're calling these souped-up ebooks Enhanced Editions, and these are not, as they say, your grandfather's ebooks.
- Full ebook application
- Unabridged audiobook synchronised to the text, read by the author with an original soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, produced and sound-directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
- 11 videos of Cave reading from the novel filmed by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
Now some of you might say: so what? Just give me the old book. And that's fair enough. But it raises a big question for publishers, because really the question is not so much about the semantics (Is this a book? Is this?), and more about the question: what should we be making?
I should admit -- or proclaim -- here that I am an ebook convert. I love ebooks. I've read numerous books (big, long books, long books I never made it through in paper, books with Tolstoy on them) on my iPhone, and though I do like to buy the paper copy as well, my iPhone reading is no less book-reading than my paper reading. In certain circumstances, I prefer the iPhone to paper for reading (at 3 a.m., for instance, in line at the bank, when I am traveling and don't want to carry four books).
But in any case, I'm not sure that the debate about what a book is really matters. What we call the thing isn't so important, is it?
The more relevant question is: what is a book for? And are there better ways to help a "book" do what it's supposed to do? O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas argued recently that many are looking at things totally upside down when they ask: "How can we replicate a book on an iPhone?" I agree totally, but let me quote Andrew directly:
The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as "how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone" is framing it wrong. The challenge is "how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses -- eyes, ears, and a mouth -- along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the 'job' of educating a student." That's a much more interesting problem to me than "how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen." [more...]
So again, I think asking and trying to answer the question, "What is a book?" might be the wrong sort of thing to spend time on. What a book "is" doesn't matter.
What matters is how we -- readers, publishers, technologists -- achieve what we want. At one point, reading a printed book (or having it read to you) was the best (certainly the cheapest and most efficient) way to get the information contained in a book transferred into your brain. But paper books aren't the only game in town anymore, and maybe in certain cases they aren't the best game.
All of us have to start asking: what are books for? And can we do that thing they are for any better with new technologies and creativity? In some cases, the answer will be no. In others, certainly it'll be yes. The real new value in publishing will come as we find new and better ways to do whatever it is books are for; and, I'll bet that in some cases, the good old book will be the best tool for doing what books are for. Whatever that is.
Bunny Munro seems to me to be the best stab yet at packaging up a book of fiction to take advantage of digital.
But we can't forget that without the thing at its core -- without the text -- the rest is not a book. We need to start with that piece of text, a self-contained, finished, independent work of thought and effort; something a writer and editors have refined to a point of completion; something a reader is willing to spend numerous hours with. That clumsy description encapsulates to me something that I think a book is.
But maybe I am off base.
What do you think a book is?
What do you think a book is for?
Here is Nick Cave reading from his novel: